Archives for March, 2008

Well, it turns out that there isn’t a handy-dandy reference for the numbers for various religions in the past. Mark Kirkorian over at The Corner linked to my earlier post where I expressed skepticism about the contention by the Vatican demographer that a larger number of Muslims than Roman Catholics is new. Other people have…

The Islamic Republic of Harvard?: But the decision put Harvard in the awkward position of having to arbitrate what constitutes legitimate religious practice. Marine claims there was a “moral and ethical responsibility” for the administration to act on this request, telling the Associated Press last month that “it’s a pretty big breach of their moral…

Dan MacArthur at Genetic Future has the details. Some of the stuff coming out of genomics reminds me a lot of what you see with social science; lots of sexy studies which turn out not to be as significant upon later analysis. Perhaps hypotheses are overrated?

Update: Follow up post with some numbers and logic laid out. Muslims more numerous than Catholics: Vatican: Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican’s newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world’s population and Catholics 17.4 percent. “For the first time in history we are no longer at the…

At my other weblog a long post on religion: On the most recent bloggingheads.tv you can watch Paul Bloom explaining why he thinks the propensity for theism is an innate bias of our species. Several years back Bloom wrote a piece for The Atlantic, Is God an Accident?, where he makes a similar case. But…

I have a review copy of Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence; but I’m not planning on reading it at this point. See John Hawks for why. Sometimes interdisciplinary work sheds new light on old questions because of the ability to think-outside-of-the-box. Sometimes not so much.

Michael C. Moynihan has a article up at Reason, In Defense of Geert Wilders: In response to the controversy surrounding Fitna, Wilders’ website was knocked offline by his American host, Network Solutions; he has been repeatedly denounced by the government of Jan Peter Balkenende as a liability to Dutch “interests”; the country’s shriveled monarch, Queen…